


Red Hands

by zapples



Category: Peter Pan & Related Fandoms
Genre: Aged up Wendy, F/M, Mild Blood, Peter is a Little Shit, red handed jill, the lost boys are conceptually horrifying and this is the hill I will die on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 06:08:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17677904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zapples/pseuds/zapples
Summary: we are loyal to those who remember us





	Red Hands

Stephen eventually found the false tree by accident. Hopelessly lost in the woods for the better part of the day and near to giving up, he stopped to catch his breath and hopefully gain his bearings again. He leaned against the mighty trunk, glancing carefully around the thick woods of Neverland, wary for any new and mystical creatures that might be eyeing him from the trees with hunger, and allowed himself a moment of rest. He was filthy, his once-prim boy’s school uniform covered in green mossy scrapes and bramble-snags, and he yanked his sweater off and tied it around his narrow waist for relief from the crushing summer heat. Peter was nowhere to be found, he had flown too fast and never once looked back to see if Stephen had been able to keep pace.

Stephen paused. The thunk of his torso against the tree had sounded too hollow. He inspected it a little more closely and discovered the thin crevice of a door. He circled it, looking at the roots until he found the lever that pulled open the secret chute, and with the courage of someone with very little left to lose, he plunged himself down it and tumbled headfirst into the Hall of Lost Boys.

“Oy! What’s this, then?” Stephen looked up to find a tall boy, possibly a year his senior at eleven or twelve, holding a nicked and dented cutlass at his throat. He was draped with a collection of crudely connected raccoon pelts. The boy leaned in close to the intruder, a suspicious sneer revealing a mouthful of brown, neglected teeth. 

“You a pirate spy?” he asked. His thick London accent, at least, felt a little like home.

“N-no!” Stephen stammered, shrinking away from the weapon. Other children, each donning a headdress of a different animal skin, began creeping into the room and circled him with eager curiosity, as though they had caught a toad in a net and all wanted the chance to poke it.

“He’s lying!” One called.

“Kill him!” Another gleefully cried.

The tallest gripped a handful of Stephen’s hair and hauled him up to his knees, his crude blade pressed into the flesh of his neck. Stephen held up his hands in a panic, tears welling in his eyes.

“I-I swear! I’ve never even seen a pirate! I’m scared of pirates! Please don’t kill me!” He looked around wildly, pleading with his eyes to the other children as they crowded closer. The first boy looked to the others and shrugged, dropping him back to the ground.

“What’s your name, then?” he asked. The group seemed to accept his judgement and smiled at Stephen, the promise of violence forgotten as suddenly as it had begun.

“Stephen,” he sniffled, standing on shaky knees.

Raccoon pelt reached out and grabbed his hand, giving it a hearty shake that rattled Stephen’s arm.

“I’m Piper,” he said cheerily, and gestured to the other children one by one.  
“And that’s Sticks, Bugface, Puddles, and Nowheresies.”

They all waved goodnaturedly. Steven waved back, unsure but smiling, happy to have found some sort of civilization.

“There you are!” came a triumphant voice. The boys parted, and Peter Pan walked through them, strutting cockily over the dirt floors. “ _I_ found him,” Peter declared proudly, jutting his thumb into his chest.

“Peter!” Stephen cried in relief, running to him and looping his thin arms around Peter’s waist. “I was lost in the forest! There were bears! And spiders!”

Peter rolled his eyes and pushed him off.

“Don’t be such a baby, Dean.”

“Stephen,” he corrected exasperatedly.

Stephen took a moment, now that the immediate danger was past, to really look at the Lost Boys for the first time. They were all understandably dirty, but most were also proudly clutching fresh wounds, their blood dramatically smeared around even the smallest cuts like war paint. He swallowed hard, gesturing to them meekly.

“How..how did you get all those..?”

Piper threw his head back, showing off a nasty slice in his shoulder.

“We fought the pirates! Didn’t kill her yet, but we gave them one hell of a show, eh Peter?”

The other boys hooted and whooped, and Peter’s elfin face twisted with a pouting scowl.

“Didn’t kill _who_?” Stephen asked, slowly melting back into the adventurous boy who had stepped out his window into the open air two nights before. His eyes sparkled with the promise of a juicy story. The boys all looked to Peter, who leaned sullenly against a pillar.

“Red Handed Jill.”

\-----

“Good form today.”

“What?” Wendy could barely hear him above the roar of the pirate’s applause. They were too wound up from the battle to enjoy a fairytale, so she had told them about Jack The Ripper, and it had been extraordinarily well received. She closed the door to the Captain’s Quarters quietly, and they sounded like the muffled ocean outside.

“I said good form.” He sat on his piano chair, facing her with a grin. He was right. She had been excellent that day, moreso even than usual. Vicious, unstoppable. Half the battle in fighting the Lost Boys, she had found, was in not underestimating them. As soon as you thought of them as children, hesitated before swinging your blade, or let your guard even halfway down for a moment, they would gut you and throw you overboard. But once you treated them as legitimate enemies, they could be overpowered. 

She had had a dream the night before, one she’d had several times before, although thankfully not for some time. In it, she was back home, abandoned in her starched blue skirts, forgotten while her mother primped and prepared her for a life she never wanted. Her bedroom window swung open and empty, and her salvation never came. So when she woke the next morning to a cavalcade of monstrous children landing on their upper deck and stabbing her crew, the ship’s resident storyteller joined in the fight with abandon. She had chosen her side long ago, and when the fire in her heart was put in a specific direction, she was loyal to a bitter fault.

Wendy reached behind her head and tore loose her ribbon, letting a waterfall of brown curls tumble over her shoulders. The captain watched her, silently appraising. She didn’t blush. That was for ladies, and she had decided to put that sort of thing behind her. She sat on an overstuffed, ornate armchair next to him and looked pointedly at the piano.

“Your swordwork improves every day.” She shrugged it off with a casual smile, though her heart swelled at his praise.

“Will you play for me?” she asked.

He tossed the tails of his red coat behind him dramatically and shook out his sleeves, starting a slow, sweet melody in the melancholy minor chords. His playing was really very beautiful, despite his obvious handicap. His working hand flowed over the keys like wind over water, and the hook anchored the melody in low, steady notes. He played carefully, but artistically and with focused intensity. The same way he fenced, and kissed, and killed, and spoke. Like he had been classically trained but preferred to bend the rules. She closed her eyes, feeling the melody lift and sway with the rocking of the ship.

When she had come home from Neverland that first time, Peter had promised he would come see her. He had sworn, his bright eyes locked with hers, that he wouldn’t forget her. But he had. When she saw him fly off that night, she had felt a heavy ache in her heart that she couldn’t explain. Doubt, and guilt for her doubting. He had promised. But she knew, deep down, that he wasn’t coming back. She could feel it. The boys didn’t understand that for ages, and when they did it hit them hard, but they got over it. Both of them eventually decided it had been a game the three of them played, a particularly fantastic make-believe. Wendy was sickened at the notion. How could they just forget? What sort of fool did it make her for believing?

Her mother had thrown herself into what she called The Wendy Project wholeheartedly, painstakingly training her in the art of proper femininity. It was torturous. By the time her mother and aunt had found her a ‘suitable husband’, a quiet and interminably boring man named Edgar, she was at the end of her rope. At night, she stared into the stars, knowing there were other worlds out there, full of freedom and adventure, burdened with the aching knowledge that no leaf-clad boy would come to bear her away from all this. Her adventure was over, and all that awaited her was this.

The night of her engagement, she had accepted the ring, and the dry kiss that followed, quietly and graciously, and climbed the steps to her childhood bedroom for the last time. It wasn’t fair, she thought, to be too old for those worlds. Who were they, who was anyone to decide her fate for her? She wanted desperately to go back, to fly across the heavens in a blaze of laughter and stars. She wanted to swordfight and swim with mermaids. And why couldn’t she? Why was it that she was sentenced to a life of drudgery and expectations? Because Peter Pan, the boy she had been foolish enough to care for, the soulless, immortal, inhuman thing she had poured so many childish dreams into, couldn’t be bothered to visit her window. He didn’t want to play her games. He had tired of her. And he had broken his promise. 

She looked out into the summer night air and squeezed her eyes tight, whispering into the starlight. _‘Please,’_ she pleaded. _‘Please, if only once, make it now. Show up at my window. Just once.’_

She waited, hot tears fighting to spill over. The storybook in which she had first read his name sat mocking her on a shelf, and in a moment of petulant rage and frustration she whipped it off the bookshelf and hurled it out her window into the night. It was pointless. She was too old. If he would ever have come back for her before, he certainly wouldn’t now.

The gears turned slowly in her head and a wild thought began to take form. There are adults in Neverland, she thought. It’s possible. Wendy concentrated, struggling to remember the pirates and the few rules she had been told. No one ages in Neverland. That meant they went there as adults, somehow. By some fluke, they managed. Maybe all she needed was pixie dust, and happy thoughts. That is, if she could find both things tonight of all nights. She hadn’t any pixie dust, and happy thoughts were in short supply. 

And after all, where would she go? Peter wouldn’t want her back, not as she was, her childhood gone, her heart bitter, her body Grown Up. She would barely even fit in the Hall of the Lost Boys.

Unbidden, Captain Hook’s velvet black voice crept into her mind, as it had so often on the edge of sleep in childhood.

“We always have room for a storyteller.” For the first time, it felt less like a deal with the devil and more like a saving grace. 

It was foolish, she thought, and more than foolish. But.. she wanted foolishness, a little. Foolish dreams were the only thing that separated her from everyone else in the gray adult world, and if she was going to be married and give up the last strongholds of childish fancy, then this may be the last chance for unbridled foolishness she would find.

She crossed the room to her desk, and opened the drawer, her fingers reaching blindly all the way to the back panel. There, in the corner, where Tinkerbell had been trapped, she found it. Illuminated by her heartfelt belief, a tiny smudge of golden sparkles. Pixie dust. Carefully, Wendy swept it up with her finger and dabbed it behind each ear like a precious, expensive perfume.

She stood at her window and crept her toes onto the ledge, letting her hands lift daintily away from her sides. She closed her eyes and took a deep, slow breath.

Swordfighting, she thought. Jungles. The ocean. Sitting on clouds.  
Wearing trousers, dancing around a fire with natives.  
Freedom. Absolute, unbridled freedom. Forever.

Her feet lifted off the ground.

 

The song ended with a flourish, and she opened her eyes. James was staring at her under the veil of his hair, his smile curious and sly. He wouldn’t ask what she was thinking, but his face implied the question. He never pried into her thoughts but always welcomed them, something she found endlessly refreshing.

“I was thinking about the first Lost Boy I ever killed,” she said wistfully.

“Ah, yes,” he murmured, propping his chin on his hand. “What was his name?”

“Tuppence, I think.”

He’d had golden curls and a squirrelish face. He was one of a few Lost Boys who had been taken prisoner after a raid on the ship, when she had first arrived. They were tied to the mast. The captain had initially distrusted her, since he remembered the fiasco her first visit. This had been flattering to her, and made it all the more insulting when none of the Lost Boys recognized her. She tried to explain to Hook that she wanted to be a pirate, a storyteller on the high seas, and that Peter Pan and his feral band of children had begun to disgust her. 

She didn’t say that Peter had abandoned her, but once she got to know the captain better she realized he probably gathered as much from the beginning. She had already shown him that she could fly, had proven her worth tying knots and securing rigging, and had even snatched a filthy brown bottle from a pirate’s hand and took a respectable swig from the liquid fire inside.

But he was unimpressed. Not with her skills, but with her loyalty. How could he know, he had purred, that she wasn’t working for Peter? And she had taken her knife and slit the hostages’ throat. His blood gushed over her hands, and she held them aloft for the crew to see.

“I am Red Handed Jill, and it would serve you ill to test me further.”

The pirates had cheered, and Hook bent low and kissed her on the back of her dripping wrist.

“Red Handed Jill,” he repeated, looking up at her with the blood of her baptism glinting on his lips. “Welcome aboard.”

Since then, the Lost Boys had made her their primary enemy. Hook was still a threat to them, of course, but she was a new challenge to face, a new puzzle to solve. Not only that, but she was a girl, a foreign species they actively despised, and the one thing worse in their philosophy than _being_ Hook was _loving_ him. They barely understood the concept, but they knew it was disgusting, and she had chosen to be a pirate rather than any of the other acceptable things to be. And she was dangerous, so they hunted her with a passion. 

Peter swung back and forth. When forcibly reminded, he would admit that he had a recollection of Wendy, and he would sulk at the prospect that she had come back without even saying hello to him, not to mention becoming a pirate. But most of the time he would forget, and crow and hoot and demand this new pirate be killed at any costs. So their battles were frequent, and intensely satisfying for all parties involved.

Hook stood from his chair, and Jill breezed past him, letting her fingers graze his collar as she passed. She toed the door to his bunk ajar and slipped inside. He turned to offer her dinner, and saw through the doorframe as she dropped her blouse from her shoulders, proud and shameless, and let it pool around her boots. He stood, lithe and hungry, followed her inside and locked the door behind them.

“Shut the lamp, would you?” she asked.

Hook smirked, and crouched by the lantern sitting on her trunk. Inside was a fairy, trapped behind the glass. She pulsed with a weak blue light, slumped on the floor. When his face neared, she pressed her slight hands against the walls of the lantern and pleaded with him, mouthing in the chiming bells of fae-speak. He smiled.

“There’s no such thing as fairies.”

**Author's Note:**

> apologies to those who came here for Split/Glass content and got duped into reading a rehash of disney and james barrie, oops


End file.
